Young Knives

First up tonight are Good Shoes. I drink £3 per can o' Red Stripe and they drink Futureheads and Tonic, with a Razorlight lime split on the rim. Holdup son, this is in no way a bad thing! No; just to say that as well as being shot through with a love for dynamic, stop-start rhythm they have the same measure of melody that mare-mugged boy Borrell has. “We are not the same” and “Never meant to hurt you” shine with playful restraint and frontman Rhys' caterwaul sounds like Berlin does in my head; teasing and morose.

The Rumble Strips sound like Dexy’s Midnight Runners playing in a haunted boathouse; their slightly more ominous brass parping and whisky drenched vocals chiming with the Jameson’s whisky ads decking the bar and a room boiling with the dense fugue of second hand smoke. Sleazy like Mississippi mud pie, they write straw boater anthems for modern living, and have one particularly great song they call ‘Motorcycle’. The melodic monologue of a not un-bitter cyclist ruing the lack of an engine, (“If only this bike were a motorcycle, I wouldn’t be moving so slow/ If only this bike were a motorcycle, I’d be over halfway home”), is a sentiment that resonates, after a summer spent dodging comically waylaid roadkill on a rush hour A4.

YAARAARGH! The time has come to crash this stolen car. Snow White throttle me with feedback, the four together a threatened dog rabid and raised on its haunches. Rather than white, my moneys on black and blood red as they dish out waves of sly, sullen noise spiked with vials more danger than the before/after negatives of tonight would suggest. The subversively melodic, beaten down moments that lay around the crumbling wreckage of songs like “Stop Anything” sound like the Stooges thrown headfirst into The Warriors; all drawn-out terror and back-street-knife-fights.

Then the Young Knives come on, and they’re good, efficient and definitely well schooled. It’s by the ties you tell. Here’s one for you boys, you sound like new stationery. You like it because it’s new, it shines in the right light and it’s very practical. But when the day ends, you know the school bully is going to smash it up and after an initial sense of irritation, you don’t mind too much. The worry doesn’t keep you awake as such. Just sort of hankers there like the guilt of kicking mud in the eyes of the school-bullied. That said, some of the things they say are brilliant; like in ‘The Decision’, (“Horses in the New Forest are running in their Sunday best”), and some of the songs they write are very well built. But their typically anxious, yet original take on the post-pop luminaries they are surely soon to join suffers tonight. It’s a bit too nervy, and despite boasting an array of impressive recorded work, tonight isn’t forceful enough to bowl me over.